The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is pleased to announce that it is the recipient of a $35,000 grant, awarded by Teagle Foundation, to support the launch of Educator Access, a new program designed to connect K-12 and community college teachers to BISR’s wide catalogue of courses in the liberal arts and science.

Through Educator Access, K-12 and community college teachers can apply for scholarships entitling them to highly subsidized enrollment in a 2018-2019 BISR course of their choice. BISR will also use the grant period to secure accreditation as a licensed sponsor of Continuing Teacher and Leader Education (CTLE), allowing teachers to receive professional development credit for their coursework. Educators will have access to the full range of BISR courses in disciplines including literature, history, philosophy, economics, and mathematics, among others, and featuring topics both timely and timeless.

“We are thrilled to be able to launch this program with the support of the Teagle Foundation,” said BISR Executive Director Ajay Singh Chaudhary. “At a time when teachers often don’t have accesses to the resources they need, we believe it is more important than ever to address this vital social need with educational opportunities built around their lives as working adults. In this sense, Educator Access is a natural extension of BISR’s mission to make critical education accessible to all.”

About the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Working in partnership with local businesses and cultural organizations, we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

Founded in 2012 with the aim of providing accessible yet rigorous opportunities for working adults to study the liberal arts and sciences, the Institute now offers 90+ courses to over 1500 students each year, in 6 states. In addition to its core seminars, BISR has built a number of other programs that—each in their own way—speak to the overriding goal of bridging the gap between scholarship and public life. These include producing the Podcast for Social Research, the Community Initiative (which offers free programming to formerly homeless New Yorkers and those facing housing insecurity), and Praxis, which builds specialized curricula and training programs designed to connect activists, organizers, and public interest workers with academic expertise related to their fields of work.

Throughout our work, BISR is animated by a series of foundational principles: that the questions raised by the arts and sciences speak to our contemporary political and social lives; that critical inquiry should be driven by social and public questions and needs; that opportunities to study them should not be restricted to those privileged enough to attend elite colleges and universities; that the public is genuinely interested in fundamental ideas related to art, civic life, and the common good and yet woefully underserved in this respect by traditional educational institutions; and that an educated and engaged citizenry is the bedrock upon which a democratic culture rests.

The Teagle Foundation works to support and strengthen liberal arts education, which we see as fundamental to meaningful work, effective citizenship, and a fulfilling life. Our aim is to serve as a catalyst for the improvement of teaching and learning in the arts and sciences while addressing issues of financial sustainability and accountability in higher education.

The Teagle Foundation supports innovation in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment with an eye towards combining improvements in quality with considerations of cost. As an organization engaged in knowledge-based philanthropy, the Foundation works collaboratively with grantees to mobilize the intellectual and financial resources necessary to provide students with a challenging and transformative educational experience. We believe that the purposes of a liberal arts education are best achieved when colleges set clear goals for themselves and assess progress toward them in effective, well-designed ways. We bring this commitment to assessment to our own work as well, regularly evaluating the impact of our grantmaking. We disseminate our findings widely, as the knowledge generated by our grantees lies at the heart of our philanthropy.